With the advent of modern local, remote, and distributed computing systems, a need has developed for monitoring such computing systems to ensure system efficiency, reliability, performance and security. Administrators for Internet Service Providers must track user visits to a plurality of web sites to report usage data to subscribers. Administrators must scan systems distributed across vast networks for viruses and other unwanted data. Administrators of large computing networks must track application usage, security logs and error logs. Changes to computer registries must be tracked for maintenance and security of individual and network computers. Unfortunately there exists no efficient and centralized method or system to allow an interested person, such as a system administrator, to review in near real-time performance, security and usage data of systems such as those described above.
Often, a systems engineer or administrator must spend a number of days of each month aggregating data for a given system. For example, a systems engineer may spend several calendar days per month collecting and summarizing system and application event logs, performance counters, security logs and Internet Information Services (IIS) logs for a distributed Internet services system in order to report performance, security and usage data. Because of the tedious and time consuming nature of the data collection and summarization, the data is always several days or even months out of date by the time summary reports are prepared and reviewed.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and system for collecting, aggregating, and reporting computing systems data in a near real-time basis. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.